Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. —OSCAR WILDE”

The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective by Steven Johnson

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This book traces how the invention of dynamite by Alfred Nobel (who went on to start the Nobel Prizes) led to the birth of the anarchist movement, which in turn led to the birth of the modern forensics-driven law enforcement agencies. Concentrating heavily on Emma Goldman and Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, this is mostly set in New York City. I can say this was a highly researched, informative, not dryly written book that seemed to not be able to make up its mind about anarchism. Johnson […]

Hyperopic people can’t see well either…. (CBR12Bingo: Yellow – Double Bingo)

Farsighted by Steven Johnson

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First off, credit where credit is due: Steven Johnson is a renaissance man. I thought the name looked familiar, and realized that he’s the author of The Ghost Map – the amazing book about contact tracing leading to the discovery of the nature of Cholera –  which I thoroughly enjoyed and wouldn’t have thought was by the same author given the difference in subject matter. He’s also the author of Where Good Ideas Come From, which I haven’t read but definitely seems a bit closer […]

The adjacent possible

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I found this book, six chapters about six different inventions or discoveries that changed the world in massive ways, to be utterly fascinating. I did, however, also enjoy a 400 page book about salt, so I understand that your mileage may vary. Then again, y’all are a bunch of nerds like me so you should probably go ahead and read this one. Steven Johnson, who also wrote a really cool book about cholera, examines six innovations that had worldwide implications. Each chapter starts with a […]

John Snow Knows How to Save the World

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  London, 1849, you are a doctor and the dreaded disease, Cholera, is literally hitting the city the like the Bubonic plague. Your neighbor was fighting fit on Monday, and Wednesday morning you watched him go out on the corpse cart. The epidemic will go on to take over 50,000 lives before petering out a few months later. But based on its track record, you know it will be back. What do you do? If you’re John Snow, anesthesiologist and part-time medical investigator, you march through […]

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

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So I took a break from wacky family PI fiction, and stepped into cholera-ridden Victorian London for a week. And let me tell you, this was one hell of a read. Johnson presents the Broad Street cholera epidemic of 1854 in all it’s horrible glory–how it started, who it affected (everyone), how it spread, the men who treated victims, the men who researched and argued its origins, and finally, how it changed just about everything about life at the time. Johnson focuses on two main […]



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